The present invention relates to a device for dividing flat pastry products, such as cookies and the like, into groups for packaging.
As is known in the pastry product industry, cookies are delivered from baking ovens, or some other item of equipment operative to either provide them with a coating or stuffing or else, virtually on a continuous basis. Accordingly, the oncoming cookies require to be divided into groups, e.g. into groups comprising a given number of cookies, laid on the flat close against each other, preparatory for delivery to a machine operative to package the individual groups.
Such division has been accomplished heretofore by acting on the cookies, laid in a continuous row within a cookie delivery trough, by means of a set of baffle plates arranged to act on the row alternately, in the manner of an escapement mechanism.
That arrangement is primarily disadvantageous in that, each time that the dividing baffle plates are operated, the row of oncoming cookie is suddenly stopped, which is obviously detrimental to the cookie integrity. A further disadvantage is that with thin cookies, and concurrently with thickness dimensions having close values to the extremes of the tolerance range, cookies may suffer damage by any of said baffle plates.
The problem underlying this invention is to provide a device as indicated, which has such constructional and operational features as to overcome the cited disadvantages affecting prior devices.
The solution provided by the present invention is that of forming a group of cookies within a substantially vertical magazine being fed from underneath by a sawtooth wheel which is fed, in turn, in a horizontal direction tangent thereto.
Based on this solutive idea, and to solve the aforesaid technical problem, this invention provides a device as specified above, which is characterized in that it comprises a sawtooth wheel wherein each tooth has a back face and a front face, which wheel is rotatable with the back faces first about a horizontal axis, a rest surface extending tangentially to said wheel at the tips and roots of its teeth, a tubular cookie-receiving magazine extending vertically above the rest surface and open thereto, a pusher acting on said rest surface toward the teeth, a tubular cookie-collecting magazine extending in a substantially vertical direction radially to said wheel, being open thereto and fed by said wheel, stop means for holding the cookies back at the collecting magazine, and a lifting finger engaged movingly across said collecting magazine to move a group of cookies away from the wheel.